The Bird: A Natural History of Who Birds Are, Where They Came From, and How They Live

by Colin Tudge

Overview

Chosen as a best book of the year by The Independent

Complete with an "annotated cast list" of all the known birds in the world—plus gorgeous illustrations—The Bird is a comprehensive and delightfully accessible guide for everyone from dedicated birders to casual birdwatchers that celebrates and illuminates the remarkable lives of birds.

In this fascinating exploration of the avian class, Colin Tudge considers the creatures of the air. From their evolutionary roots to their flying, feeding, fighting, mating, nesting, and communicating, Tudge provocatively ponders what birds actually do–as well as why they do it and how. With the same curiosity, passion, and insight he brought to redwoods, pines, and palm trees in his widely acclaimed book The Tree, Tudge here studies sparrows, parrots, and even the Monkey-eating Eagle to better understand their world–and our own.

There is far more to a bird's existence than gliding gracefully on air currents or chirping sweetly from fence posts–the stakes are life and death. By observing and explaining the complex strategy that comes into play with everything from migration to social interaction to the timing of giving birth to young, Tudge reveals how birds are uniquely equipped biologically to succeed and survive. And he offers an impassioned plea for humans to learn to coexist with birds without continuing to endanger their survival.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307342058
Publisher:	Crown Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/07/2010
Pages:	480
Product dimensions:	9.48(w) x 11.28(h) x 1.04(d)

About the Author

COLIN TUDGE is the author of The Link, The Tree, The Variety of Life, and So Shall We Reap and a fellow of the Linnean Society of London. A former features editor for New Scientist and documentarian for the BBC, he is currently a full-time writer and public speaker. He lives in Oxford, England.

Read an Excerpt

1

What It Means to Be a Flier

"All animals are equal," the ruling pigs declared in George Orwell's Animal Farm. "But," they added, "some animals are more equal than others."

All animals are equal no doubt in the eyes of God, and all that manage to survive at all in this difficult world are in some sense "equal." But some, by all objective measures, are far more impressive than others; and none, not even the mammals, the group to which we ourselves belong, quite match up to the birds. Birds have their shortcomings, to be sure, as flesh and blood must. But they are, nonetheless, a very superior form of life.

Above all, birds fly.

They are not the only animals that have taken to the air, of course. There are many gliders. Flying fish are remarkably adept, and various frogs and snakes and lizards contrive to parachute from tree to tree; and there is a variety of gliding mammals, including phalangers and squirrels and colugos (sometimes known as flying lemurs). But only four groups have managed powered flight, driving themselves through the air by flapping or whirring their wings. Many insects fly wonderfully. Bats fly well enough to catch insects in the air—and, for good measure, they do it at night. The ancient pterosaurs, contemporaries of the dinosaurs, included some of the biggest powered fliers of all time—and what a sight they must have been! Pelicans, returning home against the evening sun, might give us some idea of what they were like.

But none of these creatures flies as well as the birds. Perhaps this is why birds are still with us and pterosaurs are not. Perhaps this is why bats fly mainly at night; if they are ever forced to fly by day, as they may do in cold weather when there are too few nighttime insects, they quickly get picked off by hawks.

Flight, indeed, is the key to birds. Many have abandoned flight, of course, like penguins and Ostriches, and there are or have been flightless ducks and geese, many flightless rails and auks, at least one flightless ibis, flightless cormorants, and flightless parrots. The famous Dodo was a flightless pigeon, and there was even one flightless passerine (a perching bird)—or so it's said, though it is hard to tell, since the bird is extinct. But all of these flightless types had flying ancestors. Some birds fly but ineptly—including the superficially grouse-like tinamous of South America, which hurtle along with huge bravado but little control, and sometimes end up killing themselves, like twelve-year-old joyriders. On the whole, sensibly, tinamous prefer to stay on the ground.

The fact that birds fly—or at least are descended from ancestors that were adapted to flight—dominates all aspects of their lives. Flight brings huge and obvious advantages, but it is also immensely demanding and so has its downside, too.

What It Means To Be a Flying Machine

As a mammal, I have often admired and envied birds—as who has not?

I remember once, in southern Spain, struggling over the rocks to get to the base of some cliff to catch a glimpse of the Egyptian Vultures that in the evening appear over the edge, riding along the length of it on the up-currents—not for any obvious reason, since it is too late to feed at that time of day but just, it seems, to keep an eye on things, like the squire riding his estate.

After half an hour or so the vultures did turn up. Birds in general have big eyes—their skulls are built around the orbits—and in birds of prey they are particularly big. The eyes of a big eagle are as big as a human's. In birds of prey (and in some other birds such as kingfishers and swallows), the retina has two foveas (particularly sensitive spots), and the eyes as a whole have a greater concentration of light-gathering, color-sensitive cones than any other vertebrate. So the visual acuity of a hawk or a vulture is two or three times as great as ours. Australia's huge Wedge-tailed Eagle has been shown to see rabbits clearly from a kilometer and a half away. So I daresay that those Egyptian Vultures could see me and my companions more clearly with their unaided eyes than we could see them with all the technology of Zeiss lenses; and it took them less time and almost zero effort to fly the 6 miles or so that they had doubtless traveled than it had taken us to struggle a few hundred yards from the road. As a heavyweight mammal land-bound and land-locked by gravity, I felt inferior. All animals may be equal according to the ideology—but here, truly, birds were the masters.

Yet evolution has not worked entirely in the birds' favor. They pay a price for their magnificence and their skill; and they seem to pay an even higher price than seems strictly necessary. Even the birds that no longer fly—even the ones that have all but abandoned wings altogether, like the kiwi—deep down are built for flight. In general this means they have to be small. If you double the linear dimensions of a bird—or, indeed, of anything: a guinea pig, a brick, a ship—yet retain the same proportions, then you will increase its weight by eight times.

A bird with a body that's 20 centimeters (71/2 inches) long, like a fairly average thrush, weighs eight times as much as one of 10 centimeters (4 inches), like a small finch or weaver. A 40-centimeter (16-inch) bird like a grouse is eight times heavier again—sixty-four times heavier than the finch, or six football teams' worth of people compared to a single person. Whether or not a bird can fly depends on its wing "loading"—the mass that needs to be lifted per unit area of wing. But the area of a wing increases only four times as the body length is doubled, if the overall proportions remain the same. So a thrush that needs to fly as well as a finch needs wings that are twice as big, relative to its body size, as the finch's—and so on and so on: the bigger the bird, the bigger the wing needs to be, not only in absolute terms but also relative to the body size.

The physics of flight is well understood—or so the textbooks suggest. My own sympathies lie with an airline pilot I once met who regularly took 747s across the Atlantic but told me that he still did not quite believe that such egregious structures could really fly at all, since they are big as a row of small houses and many times heavier than air, and stuffed with people and suitcases for good measure. He did his job and drew his salary in a haze of incredulity.

The point of the scientific theory, though, is that air is not so insubstantial as it seems. A wind of 30 miles an hour is difficult to walk against. A hurricane of 100 miles an hour can flatten entire cities, can pick up roofs and even motor cars and hurl them halfway across a state, as so many people have experienced. The energy thus implied is tremendous. Creatures or machines that can harness this energy can fly.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The Bird

“Colin Tudge marries the poetry and the science of the dinosaur’s best-loved descendants. . . . A master of clear science writing, Tudge throws a state-of-the-art spotlight on every aspect of the bird’s life from migration to cooperation.”—The Independent

“[A] book simply fizzing with ideas. Provoking yet always persuasively argued. . . . Besides having an enviable grasp of scientific fact, Tudge writes with narrative fluency.”—Literary Review

“Tudge’s writing is always clear and frequently embellished with wry humor. Occasionally, it is inspired.”—Sunday Telegraph

“In the book’s final section . . . the gloves are off, and he produces a masterful critique of politicians and economists, making an excellent (but probably doomed) case against the geopolitical status quo and its tragic effect on the world’s birds. This is a powerful, thoughtful piece of writing, which transforms an entertaining romp through avian biology into a compelling tract for our times.”—The Guardian

Praise for The Tree

“Enchanting . . . Tudge sees grandeur in how trees exist in the world . . . and demonstrates it with fascinating stories.”—New York Times Book Review

“Tudge writes in the great tradition of naturalists such as Humboldt and John Muir. . . . Eloquent and deeply persuasive.”—Los Angeles Times

“A love letter to trees, written with passion and scientific rigour . . . a pleasure to read. Tudge writes with warmth and wit.”—The Financial Times

From the Publisher

Pablo Picasso once complained, "Everyone wants to understand painting. Why is there no attempt to understand the song of birds?" New Scientist polymath Colin Tudge meets that challenge and much more in this quite logical follow-up to his popular The Tree. His urge to understand is apparently insatiable; he is deeply intrigued by the color-coded eating habits of peacocks, the sex life of seabirds, and the nesting habits of kiwis and puffins. With Aesop, Tudge knows that it is not just fine feathers that make fine birds; pigeons seem to fascinate him as much as the brightly colored leafbirds of India and the Philippines. The Bird will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about birds and somehow leave you even more delighted.

A serious exploration of bird life from biologist Tudge (Feeding People Is Easy, 2007, etc.). The author writes with clarity and cheerful wit about the physics and mechanics of flight, evolution and the archaeological record, while at the same time suffering no fuzziness about the strict nomenclature and precise methods of biology: "The twenty-eight species of Old World orioles-absolutely not to be confused with the New World orioles-form the family Oriolidae." Tudge appreciates that much remains a great mystery in nature-"The distribution of penises among birds seems somewhat arbitrary and hard to explain"-but he celebrates invention, supposition and anthropomorphism when based on the findings of good science ("The birds twitter for a reason-and it won't be a frivolous reason"). He warns against judging the effectiveness of conservation efforts by economic standards and condemns the scourge of materialism and boundless ignorance of humans, which has led to the extinction of countless species of birds. "The point of this book," he writes, "is to nudge people who feel in a general way that birds in particular, and nature in general, are kind of interesting to the point where they start to feel the meaning of it all." An artful recorder, Tudge delightfully chronicles the everyday life of birds and how they interact with each other and with other animals. He covers the avian landscape like a tarp, from amusing anecdotes about bird behavior, to a critique of behavioralism, to the abuse of Darwin's theories, to the complex structure of avian taxonomy ("All the Birds in the World: An Annotated Cast List"). Entertaining, charming and knowledgeable.

Kirkus Reviews